1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an artillery projectile fuse equipped with a dielectric antenna in the form of a carrier disk, which is installed in a hood of the projectile fuse transversely of the rotational longitudinal axis thereof, and which is electrically conductive and laminated geometrically differently on both sides thereof.
2. Discussion of Prior Art
A fuse equipped in that manner is generally known from the disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 6,098,547 A.
Therein, a receiving circuit in the base of the fuse, which is shaped like a truncated cone, is connected along its axis via a coaxial cable to a dielectric disk antenna, which is installed in the fuse concentrically and transversely to the lengthwise axis in front of the receiving circuit in the flight direction. The disk antenna is in turn a circumferential slot antenna, transverse to the axis, for navigation and telemetry frequencies, having inductive tuning of bandwidths and mid-band frequencies via electrically conductive channels, whose axes are parallel, between the electrically conductive laminations of the dielectric disk on both sides. The transverse emission of its antenna characteristic is also encouraged in that the dielectric disk extends out into the outer lateral surface of the fuse hood and only the front covering of the disk maintains a small radial spacing from the hood. Such an antenna orientation transverse to the flight direction is expedient for radio links to the hemisphere; however, it is not suitable for a range measurement to the front in the flight direction, as would be necessary for fuse triggering upon reaching a predetermined remaining range to an object or above ground. Using such a single-layered disk antenna, resonance frequencies which deviate strongly from one another also cannot be generated, because of which the telemetry frequencies are to be selected in the same order of magnitude due to the externally predetermined carrier frequencies of the navigation satellites. This complicates undisturbed transmission and analysis of this information, which varies greatly per se, whose transmission and processing in significantly different frequency bands would be preferable.
A similar multifrequency antenna is known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,305,078 A, with the characteristic therein that multiple inductively tunable disk antennas of this type are positioned one on top of another like a sandwich and electrically connected in series as a transversely-emitting slot antenna.
A missile having a multisensor target control, which has a combination of an infrared detector and radar detector, is known from U.S. Pat. No. 6,150,974 A. For a disk antenna that which emits frontally because of its only localized covering, a dielectric material transparent to infrared radiation is selected so that in the region of the missile tip, the infrared detector may be positioned behind the disk antenna, which is installed coaxially and transversely to the lengthwise axis, in the flight direction.
According to DE 24 08 578 A1, a dielectric disk antenna usable both for telemetry tasks and as a ranged fuse, having the same frequency range for both tasks, has a square electrode covering on each side of the disk, the smaller of which has an edge length approximately equal to half of the average operating wavelength of the antenna. Since tuning for the two different tasks is performed via asymmetrical recesses in the smaller electrode surface, an omnidirectionally uniform antenna characteristic does not result, through which reception of amplitude-modulated information in the rotating projectile is decisively interfered with.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,943,520 A describes a dielectric disk antenna, which is capacitively tunable in the peak range of the power supply, in the form of a triangular dielectric disk which is fitted in the fuse tip along the fuse lengthwise axis.
For the artillery rocket according to EP 0 840 393 8, a dielectric carrier substrate is provided on the outer lateral surface of its fuselage for electrically conductive areas which are coupled to one another thereon and which are laid out as the antenna structure for the carrier frequency of navigation satellites. As much as these lateral surface antenna as have already proven themselves for receiving satellite location information, they nonetheless have the disadvantage of not being able to be applied to the projectile—particularly as retrofitting—without problems in regard to the mechanical strain when being fired from a barrel.